 So we're here at the CES Unveiled. Hi, so who are you? Hi, my name is James Pryor. I work for the product office of SciFive, helping to manage product launches and analyst and press relations. So SciFive is kind of like the risk five company, you know, one of them. What is SciFive doing in the risk five ecosystem? So what SciFive does is we are the leading provider of commercial risk five IP and silicon. So whether you want a core or a full chip or an SOC design, we can help you design the product that you need for your market. Does that mean all these companies that are kind of like joining or thinking about risk five are partnering with you to create new designs? There's a lot of partners out there. We have now a hundred and fifty design wins. We're working with six of the top ten semiconductor companies, but only three of those different wins are actually public. Yeah, from microchip with the Polifier SOC through to WAMI with the Amazfit smartwatch and FADU with the SSD controller. Which one was the last one? FADU. Yeah, they're a brand new Korean startup that can create enterprise storage, very, very fast SSDs for enterprise use. So I did a video with WAMI, Amazfit, and I was wondering if their risk five chip is actually in smartwatches or just a production future project. Is it shipping? Yeah, it's in the shipping products right now. It's inside of there. They're using our cores to power the functions of the watch. It's a very, very strong, good product, and we're excited to see them go broader than the China market and launch the rest of the world. Perhaps the way they're using it is like a side CPU next to the ARM core. Like they have an extra chip. What is the main chip of the smartwatch? Yeah, there's two chips in the watch. One is from Qualcomm, which provides the connectivity and some of the AI processing. And then the other chip is from themselves and using the sci-fi cores for a lot of the core functions of the watch, including some of the key day-to-day gatekeeping regular operations. And the first one was microchip polar... Polifier SoC is an FPGA, uses risk five cores inside of it to produce the performance and programmability. Is that shipping or is it just for trade shows? It's just been announced. I think they're going to be shipping this year, so you should follow up with them to see when exactly they're coming to market. Would you say 150 design links, really? That sounds like a lot. Yeah, 150 design links. Yeah, it is a lot. We're very excited about it. That means you have more than 150 employees? Yeah, way more. Way more? Yeah, we're up to nearly 600 now. We have 16 design centers across the world. So we have a lot of rapid hyper growth in 2019. We expect to continue to grow in 2020. 600? This is a big enterprise. It is. I thought it was just a small startup. Well, we're still growing. There's a lot more to do. We've got a lot of things to complete in our ambitious goals of making risk five the choice of the world for their processing needs. But we're working hard, right? Because our product roadmap has a lot of different aspects to it. You have all of the different cores that we offer. What are you looking here? Yeah, sure. So this is our core product roadmap. You have our eCores, which are 32-bit, great for embedded use. S-Cores, which are 64-bit, also great for embedded microcontroller use. And our uCores, which are high-performance 64-bit application capable cores for application processes. Alongside those core IPs, we have a number of different other IPs. So we can provide interfaces and IOs as well as fabrics and other IP to help build the whole SOC. And we can tap into our extensive partners in DesignShare to give even more IP for any design. So is it like when people want to do it risk five, they pretty much have to go through sci-fi? Or is anybody doing stuff by themselves? There are tons of people doing stuff by themselves. You don't have to go through sci-fi though obviously we would prefer that. But it's a very wide and broad ecosystem. A great example is that there's a lot of different providers working on their own risk five implementations. But sci-fi being founded by the inventors of risk five and being so close to the heart of all of the different developments is the natural choice because of the strength of our IP, the quality of our products and the our abilities to deliver SOCs and silicon, where it makes us a really strong contender for every design. So sci-fi have kind of launched risk five or not really? No, no. Is it the same people behind in the beginning? Yeah, definitely the same people. Sci-fi was founded by the inventors of risk five but we didn't launch risk five. We're just leading the charge on the adoption and spreading the word of the risk five uprising. So who are the founders? So the founders are Krista Sanovich who's our chief architect and also the risk five foundation chairman. We have Yonsep Lee and Andrew Waterman and they are all part of the original UC Berkeley team that created risk five a decade ago and then five years ago created the risk five foundation to share that ISA with the world free and open. And then because you need experience in building silicon and designing cores to use that ISA we created sci-fi so we can have a great partner for anybody who wants to build a chip or design a new product based on risk five. So how would you say is the status of risk five in the industry? Is it more than just talk and hype? How far is mass adoption? Or is it happening? Yeah, it's well past the initial adoption phase. You see we've got partners like Samsung saying that they're going to use risk five cores for AI 5G and autonomous driving application processors. There's no way that that can be considered initial adoption. This is mainstream. This is real. We now have a really strong foundation in the market and we're just going to continue to grow. But many companies are saying they are joining the risk five organization or something while adding their names to the list, right? But it's not the same as shipping. No, it takes time to ship cores. So we now have 450 plus members of the risk five foundation. That's a very strong healthy base with over 300 of those being companies like NVIDIA, IBM, Red Hat. You've got the biggest names in industry and technology joining the risk five foundation so they can develop their own IP so they can be part of this uprising and the part of adopting risk five. The benefits of risk five stand for themselves with low power, high performance, ease of use and high security as well as a low cost of adoption. But all these things are also in the arm, right? For sure, but that doesn't mean there shouldn't be competition. We're not looking to say one product is bad, ours is good. We're offering a choice. And the benefit of our choice and the risk five foundation is that we can prevent fragmentation by using a common ISA and we can also improve power use and efficiency and increase adoption of the risk five ISA with domain specific designs. If you look at the design trends that are going on right now, it's not about the CPU architecture. It's about the whole SOC capability. How do you add in intelligence for AI decisions in different places? Sorry, I ran out of battery. So I was asking, so ARM also has a lot of these things, but one thing that kind of happened maybe is because of risk five, ARM and also kind of open sourcing thing. Do you hear this? Whether people can modify the architecture somehow or... Yeah, so I think if I were to look at ARM and say, what they're doing in response to industry requests is custom instructions and I think that's what you're referring to and also designing custom silicon. So the industry as a whole is moving towards having domain specific architectures. CPUs or processors or SOCs designed with a specific function in mind that's more generic than an application specific integrated circuit but less programmable than an FPGA. So to achieve that, you need a very specific set of instructions to be supported, but you also need a very focused set of instructions to enable what you have. Now the reason why risk five is successful in this area is because of our scalability and our extensibility. Sci-Fi in particular offers scalable architectures whereas everybody else is offering pretty much a standard core that everyone should use. We offer the customizability and flexibility to configure your core the way you need it for your project and that's the key differentiator for Sci-Fi versus everyone else. But when people make ARM SOCs, they do a lot of customization. They do like some people want to have large, small, too big cores or big little, all these things and microcontrollers. That's not the kind of customization we're talking about. We're talking about different kind of customization? Yeah, it's an extension of that. So when you're talking about a heterogeneous compute where you're mixing and matching different types of cores we have no restrictions on which cores you use from our portfolio. When you're talking about custom SOCs we're not talking about a custom architecture design we're talking about all the IP inside of that silicon whether it's an AI accelerator or a vision processor or an audio processor or if it's something else. All of that integration and customization is the new domain specific processor focus. So when you say that you have a bunch of cores is that what you're talking about here? That's the Sci-Fi cores implementations of RISC-5. You have a broad rate all the way from microcontrollers to big things. Yeah, absolutely. So we have our E-Series cores which are 32-bit embedded processor cores, our S-Series cores which are 64-bit embedded processor cores and we have our U-Series cores which are application processors for Linux and their scaling performance as well. How's the Linux support? It's great. We've got a number of different distributions ported over. We have a number of different libraries and compilers. There's a lot of people able to use Linux for whatever their application needs are with RISC-5. And so Sci-Fi is looking to be a big player in the future of chips. What's the big vision? The big vision is to make it easier and simpler to design your products. So what we want to do is unlock your product roadmap from the stagnated single point of issue with a standard core roadmap update into allowing you to design your processor cores around your workload right now. And that's going to help you declare silicon independence because you can move these different parts of the IP to different process technologies and nodes. So it's really about owning your roadmap as a product company and not being reliant on a technology roadmap that you don't have any input on. So what's the price? RISC-5 is supposed to be free, right? But working with Sci-Fi, there's like licensing? How does it work? Yeah, sure. So RISC-5, as an instruction set architecture, is free and open and you can grab it wherever. Now people around the world are used to and like paying for excellence, expertise, and engineering. The way I think about it is the internal combustion engine. Everyone knows how the internal combustion engine works. They're taught how to design one or how they work in school. But if you want to buy one, you just go down one on one and say here it is, you have to buy one from somebody who has it, you want to buy support for it. And there's a variation in performance levels. If you go to Italy, then between Fiat and Ferrari is a massive difference in performance and features and functionality. And you pay for that difference. And what you're paying for is engineering, excellence, and expertise. And that's what you buy from Sci-Fi, is engineering, excellence, and expertise because you're getting IP that's silicon-proven, that's designed to meet a specific product need, and that has been used well many times for all of the different use cases you're looking for. So that's why we have a licensing model that is based on production use as well as your units so you can figure out what is the best method of model for you. It's similar to licensing an arm core? Possibly, I don't really know how I'm licensed their products. As far as I remember, maybe it's something to do with a big upfront fee and then a small fee for each chip, maybe. Is it something like this? If they want to start a new project with you, there's some kind of startup fee and then after, there might be one by one? Yeah, anybody who's interested in talking to Sci-Fi about pricing should contact our sales department. Where are you based? We have 16 design centers worldwide. Our headquarters is in San Mateo, California, and we have another big engineering center in Austin, Texas where I work at. Is it possible that all the RISC-5 stuff can be made in a way to not fragment away from ARM? Is there a way that somehow maybe there would be a layer in all the IoT stuff that software would be compatible? Is there a way for all the stuff to be compatible from one to the other? I don't think so. I think that would violate ARM's license and agreements or their patents, so I don't think that would be a good idea. So it's nothing to do with reverse engineering anything, right? No, there's no need. If you want to be compatible with ARM software, then use ARM. But if you're looking to lower your power, use less area, and increase performance, you should use RISC-5. And so it's the Google chairman who started the RISC. Isn't it Patterson? Yeah, he's not the chairman of Google, no. What is he at Google? He's something. I don't know, you should ask him. I thought he was the chairman now. Alphabet, I don't know, something like that. I was like, whoa, it's two guys, no? Did the RISC, is it one of them? How are they involved in RISC-5 in any way? Yeah, they're involved in the RISC-5 Foundation, so they helped to push further with developing the new aspects of it and increasing the adoption and answering questions. Cool. All right, thanks a lot. What's next? What's being announced here? Yeah, so we're just here to talk about all of the great products we've got from our U8 series cores, which we launched recently at the Lindy Conference. This is a high-performance, out-of-order microprocessor architecture based on RISC-5, scalable and very low area as well as high efficiency. So we're excited about that being introduced to the world. And we're also talking about our Sci-5 Learn Inventor, which is our new board, now available worldwide. And it's for universities and students and makers to be able to learn how to program RISC-5 for IoT. It's the world's first IoT board based on RISC-5 that is qualified for AWS IoT Core. So very excited that you can use that now with Amazon Web Services IoT Core. It's got a bunch of LEDs. Yeah, these are LEDs. It has a bunch of different features. You've got Wi-Fi Bluetooth. It's programmable via USB. It has accelerometer, gyroscope, light sensor, compass. So it has a bunch of different features like you might see on an IoT board in the field. It's just a super set of those so you can learn how to program all of them together. All right. And what's happening day-to-day at the office? Well, day-to-day is just about 100 impressions about RISC-5 and helping to adopt Sci-5 cores with all of our partners.